Warm greetings from Mexico

I'm your WikiNeighbour. Welcome to our dynamic community of 76,129 WikiEducators. I see you are starting the EL4C19 Workshop. You will be working along with two amazing facilitators, Patricia and Nellie. Enjoy the journey and work at your pace. I'm certain you will become a great WikiEducator. Congratulations.

Thanks for your warm welcome. I think we may have some interests in common--I'm also interested in nature and conservation. Math is very important to biologists and I'm working on, among other things, the Discrete Mathematics course sequence over at Wikiversity. Anyways, I'm very excited about participating in the workshop and joining the WikiEducator community.

You can decide between joining any WE already developing project, or starting a new one. In my case I would love to work on a lesson of Boolean logic and its application in search engines (e.g. Google). This would be a very helpful resource for those WikiEducators novice in data searching through computers and Internet.

The Internet doesn't seem to have very much in the way of organized courses where individuals can really practice their math problem solving skills. To me this seems like an important thing to add to any wiki. The instructors and instruction for the WE course I'm in seem quite impressive. Working on the Wikiversity pages, I've been practicing some advanced formatting but I still have things to learn in that area (just to let you know). Just curious, are you on any other wikis? --AFriedman 14:30, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Never been on any wiki before WE. I just learned here (see EL4C15) the wiki markup which is quite simplier than HTML markup, but even here fortunately some HTML markup is available to create amazing well formed pages. Right now I am working on some CSS codes for tables and $ $ codes for the math projects I am in. Learning should never end :)

In 2002 I published a Patent Monitoring Guide as my final assignment for a Posgraduate certification course on Technology Management. One of the topics deals with searching on databases. Most of databases use Boolean operators in their input fields, sometimes the codes must be written by the user. In the case of Google, we dont have to insert the code, but my idea is to make WE users realise they are applying boolean logic when they use advanced searching in Google. This is a good strategy to teach math.

IMO Wikiversity has some interesting and useful resources, and it also has the advantage of being affiliated with Wikipedia. Right now, though, it's not nearly as well organized as WikiEducator seems to be. On WV there's a lot of discussion about how to create structured courses in a wiki environment. So I'm curious how EL4C19 works. I thought the time estimates for how long the lessons should take were VERY much underestimates, so I said they should take a longer amount of time...to me, the fact that students can give the instructors feedback like that and make it part of the course is one of the more interesting aspects of wiki based learning. In addition to Wikiversity and WikiEducator, I've also been contributing to Wikipedia. I don't know how to use CSS or LaTeX, and I've only started being serious about Computer Science a few months ago. I'm very excited about how much people can learn on the internet, and it's only going to get better.

Regarding your comments on time estimations, you can talk to Nellie. Feedback is always necessary in great projects. I've seen Wikipedia has a great structure, I've have been retrieving some help pages to study codes and layout from them.

The wiki markup is actually a simplification of some HTML codes, CSS stands for the codes used in HTML for creating the layout and formatting with colors, sizes, fonts, alignments, etc. So right now you are learning some CSS codes (soon you will learn to use the code: "<span style="color:#FFFFFF; background:#FF69B4"> Hi Ann </span>", which displays: Hi Ann . style is an attribute for span related with CSS code.

LaTeX is a typesetting system used to render a complete set of symbols necesary to write a well formed scientific book. It has symbols for the complete math notation, symbols for Science and Technology, Text Formatting, etc. You can see Help:Displaying Special Characters. This is a nice formula created with LaTeX:

$ $

Just switch this message to edit mode, and easily you will find the code which begins with '''<math>''' tag and finishes with '''</math>''' tag.

Please visit my user page, scroll down and visit the math projects I am working on.

Thanks. Do you have any thoughts about which particular learning resource/page the Boolean Logic and Google lesson could be part of? I would prefer to work on an existing learning project, or at least on one that is likely to be further developed in the near future. --AFriedman 20:20, 30 January 2009 (UTC)